Just a couple questions to clarify your situation a little:

How old are you?

Does anyone else live with you and your mother?

Does she have any other living family members that she has relationships with and what are those relationships like (as far as you are aware)?

Why can’t you move out?

Dear Tugalie:

A child naturally feels emotional attachment, aka love toward one’s mother. A fawn/ very young deer follows its mother into and through the woods, follows her everywhere she goes because it is motivated by the same emotional attachment to its mother. The evolutionary purpose for this emotional attachment is the fawn’s survival. It follows its mother because she leads it toward its well being.

In humans, often, there is a perversion of nature. The mother, often enough, leads the child toward sickness, not well being. In nature, the mother deer does not turn against her fawn, biting it and beating it to the ground. Unfortunately for humans, this often happens.

So the human child naturally feels a strong emotional attachment to a mother that is injuring the child.

Your mother is hurting you, again and again. No matter how hard you tried to help her (a reversal of roles, since she is supposed to be helping you!), she keeps hurting you. It is cruel for her to threaten suicide- this is very scary for a child, who naturally feels this attachment to the mother, to hear this threat.

Leave her and cut contact. Never look back… but it will not be easy because of your natural attachment to her and because you are weak as a direct result of her abuse of you.

Leave her. What can be worse for you out there? If you can manage, out there, to eat enough just to survive, and if you can keep yourself warm enough to survive cold weather… and if you can keep yourself away from being sold as a sex slave or such thing, you would be better of, wouldn’t you?

There is no one more than a child, minor or adult, willing to see one’s mother in the best light, excusing her abuse, minimizing it, denying it, some or most, or all of the time, distorting reality so to feel relatively safe (“It’s not so bad..”)- but it is bad. Very bad for you to be trapped like this.

Freedom, seek it, aim at it.

Please write back. I would like to keep communicating with you!

anita

Dear Tugalie:

The only way you can move out is to become a sex slave? This is a good argument on your part to not moving out. I am convinced.

I am glad you don’t feel love for your mother, that this ship has sailed!

Problem is, in your original post you wrote that living with her is “really taking a toll on your emotions” and that you are starting to feel that your mother is right and you are wrong. This is happening now, even though you don’t feel love for her.

You mentioned “mental illness” in your original post: her mental illness? Your mental illness? What is it?

anita

Dear Tugalie:

You suffered and are still suffering the consequences of her abuse of you. I can very much relate to your situation.

I too thought I no longer loved my mother. For years I felt nothing but anger for her. I even felt guilty for not loving her.

A few years into my healing and after no longer having any contact with her, to my great surprise, I felt love for her, my goodness, what a surprise. But I didn’t renew contact with her because at that point I understood that all children naturally feel love for their mothers no-matter-who-the-mother is.

Have you ever attended psychotherapy? If so, what was that experience like?

I have a lot to share with you as I think we have a lot in common, and I will if we continue to communicate, over time.

anita

Dear Tugalie:

You mean you might move out and live in a youth housing? This is an excellent idea and I hope it works out and you do move out ASAP. If I lived with my mother, no amount of therapy would have helped me. When I was in my mother’s company, even in telephone contact only with her, it was like you wrote: “old (wounds) keep opening up.”

My therapist combined CBT, DBT and Mindfulness. He was my first competent, caring and hard working therapist, five years ago.

But back to you moving out, I am very hopeful for you. I don’t know anything about you and your situation more than you shared on this thread, but I do know enough to be certain that moving out for you is the right thing to do, the beginning of your healing.

I wonder if you get on the waiting list and how long it is.

anita

Dear Tugalie:

Living away from your mother is something to look forward to, to hope for… freedom from abuse, yes! Please do keep in touch with me here, as well as others who are supportive of you.

If this is an “average angry and moody mom” this is very sad. Average, huh? My goodness!

Till your next post, take best care of yourself possible, please!

anita